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Domain Investing Stats and Tips

A debate about Hyphenated domain names

September 20, 2019 by Raymond Hackney

Hyphenated Domain Names

Are you adding hyphenated .coms to your domain portfolio?

Rob Monster started a thread where he expressed his optimism for an uptick in hyphenated .com domain names. Rob’s company just sold Sushi-man.com for $4,200.

Just sold sushi-man.com from an Epik SSL lander for $4200. This is one of Epik’s O&O domains. I don’t normally report sales but these days we are routinely asking for $10K+ for good hyphen .COM names and seeing sincere engagement.

The great gTLD experiment has been run. I now routinely sell even ccTLD registrants are upgrading from their ccTLD to .COM if they can afford it. I was late to acknowledge it but the risk-reward equation for speculators overwhelmingly favors .COM.

When it comes to hyphenated .COM, SEO is your friend. I recommend to use the Epik SSL landers but any SEO lander will probably do the trick to drive inquiries. The Epik landers happen to work like a champ and will help you sell hyphen names especially with.

Brad Mugford posted:

I sold a hyphenated .COM in the last couple weeks for $14K. It was probably a term that would have sold for $500,000+ without the hyphen.

However, I will say hyphenated sales are few and far between even for top quality terms that make sense.
That type of sale is an outlier.

Brad

Most agreed with Brad, there is no real uptick, just a couple nice sales.

Sales data for the top ten hyphenated domain names of all time according to Namebio

hotel-reservation.com 209,916 USD 2009-09-23 Sedo
free-sms.de 162,150 USD 2010-01-26 Sedo
online-casino.de 144,900 USD 2012-06-20 Sedo
online-casinos.de 84,500 USD 2012-03-21 Sedo
18-wheeler.com 82,390 USD 2007-07-03 Moniker
faire-part.com 59,056 USD 2008-11-04 Sedo
blackjack-vegas.de 53,218 USD 2017-04-07 Sedo
sci-fi.com 50,000 USD 2017-04-25 Uniregistry
black-jack.com 49,657 USD 2017-03-29 Sedo
online-games.com 48,000 USD 2012-04-04 Sedo

As an fyi I regged Blackjack-Vegas.com when the .de sale happened to see if any traffic or interest would happen on the .com over the next year, there was none and I dropped it.

Namebio has 724,491 sales of those 19,323 hyphenated or 2.66% of all sales.

Hotel-Reservation.com was a great flip, it was first purchased for $4,080 in 2007 and sold for $209,916 in 2009. Today the domain does not even resolve. This two word combo is registered in 79 extensions.

Free-Sms.de is the second highest hyphenated sale that’s ever been reported. The domain sold for $162,150 and now redirects to Kurse.de (Courses in German).

Online-Casino.de was the third highest reported hyphenated domain sale. The name sold for $144,900 in 2012 after selling for $5,075 a year before, now that’s a great domain flip.

5 of the top 10 hyphenated sales are gaming related.

18-wheeler.com sold for $82,390 back in 2007 and now is just a parked page offering the name for sale.

Personally I only own one hyphenated domain name, it’s a term that is often referenced with a hyphen, start-ups.org.

So what are your thoughts on hyphens?

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Filed Under: Domain trends, Domaining 101, Hyphenated Domain Names

About Raymond Hackney

Raymond Hackney has been involved with domain names since 1997. One of the most prolific writers in the domain industry and founder of TLDinvestors.com and 3Character.com

Comments

  1. Data Glasses says

    September 20, 2019 at 8:44 pm

    I held White-Dress/Com (weddings) for years and never had any interest even after reaching out to google search results, same story with Black-Dress/Com …… lesson learnt

  2. Jared says

    September 20, 2019 at 11:28 pm

    I own about 10 in a portfolio of 600. I’ve been trying to sell my hyphenated domains for dirt cheap with no success. Here are some of the better ones: Tortilla-Chips.com, Cool-Videos.com, Veggie-Burger.com, 99-cents.com, golf-shirts.com, dont-smoke.com, bar-grill.com, libra-coin.com, and video-tape.com…I’ll sell all 10 for 2K.

  3. Antonis Skandalis says

    September 21, 2019 at 9:04 am

    At some countries, like .de, .gr really love hyphenated domain !

  4. Mike says

    September 21, 2019 at 11:12 am

    I think Rob just wanted people to go to Epik, and register a boatload of hyphen domains lol, always a salesman.

    Even trying to sell Epik also the company, as Escrow’s Matt Barrie happend to mention.

    Hyphens are a crapshoot we all know it, the odd sale happens, and we all go nuts, it has no bearing on an overall industry if one random user overpays for a hyphen, Robert Monster knows better.

  5. Arthur IM says

    September 22, 2019 at 3:36 pm

    I have only one “Invest-Here.com” . Used it for some old projects. I have it like a collectionable item, not interested to sell it . Despite of all I have received some phone calls from Germany asking info for it.

  6. John says

    September 25, 2019 at 4:16 pm

    Raymond – you left out this one:

    Block-chain.com

    $1,000,000 (111 Bitcoins)

    • Raymond Hackney says

      September 25, 2019 at 7:16 pm

      Well I was listing reported sales by someone in our industry, DN Journal or Namebio.

      The article where it was reported was a sponsored post.

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